Suspension of the Death Penalty Is All but Assured in New Jersey

By DAVID W. CHEN

Published: January 6, 2006

With a crucial committee vote on Thursday, New Jersey lawmakers all but assured that the state's death penalty would be suspended for a year so that its fairness and expense can be studied.

The review of the death penalty would be conducted a by a legislative commission, authorized by a bill that the State Assembly's Judiciary Committee sent to the floor after a 4-2 vote. The State Senate has already passed the measure by a wide bipartisan margin, and legislators now expect it to sail through the full Assembly on Monday. Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey has promised to sign it before he leaves office on Jan. 17.

New Jersey has not executed anyone since 1963, but several of the 10 people on death row are close to exhausting their appeals. A state appeals court has temporarily blocked executions pending adoption of standard procedures for administering lethal injections, but the legislative action is not directly a result of that ruling.

If the bill that advanced on Thursday becomes law, as expected, then New Jersey would be the third state to impose a moratorium and the first to do so through legislation. The governors of Illinois and Maryland used their executive powers to suspend executions in their states.

The bill would also be the latest step in a push in some states to slow the pace of executions, especially in light of advances in DNA testing and growing concerns about the number of wrongful convictions.

Thirty-eight states have enacted death penalties since the United States Supreme Court restored capital punishment in 1976, the most recent being New York in 1995. But in June 2004, New York's top court struck down the law, finding a central element of its sentencing provisions unconstitutional. It appears unlikely that the law will be revived in New York anytime soon, given the opposition from Democrats who control the Assembly.

Elsewhere, about a dozen states are re-examining their capital punishment laws.

Most public opinion polls have indicated solid support for the death penalty. Underscoring the political delicacy of the subject, several New Jersey legislators who voted for the moratorium on Thursday stressed that they still supported the death penalty.

For instance, Assemblyman Patrick J. Diegnan Jr., a Democrat from Union County, said he would have supported the execution of any of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had they survived. He also said he shared concerns raised by the New Jersey State Bar Association about possible flaws in the law.

''Let's once and for all have a precise, understandable policy in the state,'' he said.

Since New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982, there have been 197 capital cases in the state, and a dozen or so more are now pending. Of the 60 people sentenced to death, most have seen their death sentences overturned and are now serving a life term in prison, according to a recent report by New Jersey Policy Perspective, a liberal public policy group.

The inmate closest to being executed, according to people who study the death penalty issue, is John Martini, who killed a Bergen County businessman in 1989.

If New Jersey were to replace the death penalty today with a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole, and each of the 10 people on death row were resentenced accordingly, the cost to the state would be $15.1 million, according to Mary E. Forsberg, research director for New Jersey Policy Perspective. In contrast, she said, it could cost the state up to $845 million if court challenges in the same 10 cases were pursued under current laws.

Such arguments, as well as a clutch of often heartbreaking personal tales, played out in the State House on Thursday morning before a packed hearing of the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

One of the leading advocates of scrapping the state's death penalty, Celeste Fitzgerald, director of New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, talked about wrongful convictions in New Jersey and around the country.

''They can and do happen in New Jersey, just as in other states,'' she said.

But Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll, a Republican from Morris County who is also a lawyer, said he opposed the moratorium because it was unnecessary.

''I have to quasi-agree with McGreevey,'' Mr. Carroll said, referring to former Gov. James E. McGreevey, who in 2003 vetoed a bill that called for studying the death penalty, in part because he felt that previous studies were sufficient.

Then there was the riveting testimony of Marilyn G. Zdobinski, a former county prosecutor now in private practice in Totowa, who prosecuted Mr. Martini in the early 1990's. She defended the current system as being thorough and suggested that any criticism of how long a death penalty case took missed the point.

''The people who are telling you there are problems with the system? They don't know the system,'' she said. ''The system is working. That's why it's taking this long.''

Photo: The death chamber at Trenton State Prison, seen through the gallery window. Ten people are on death row in the state. (Photo by Laura Pedrick for The New York Times)

Correction: January 7, 2006, Saturday
An article yesterday about the likely suspension of the death penalty by the New Jersey legislature misstated the county of Assemblyman Patrick J. Diegnan Jr. He is from Middlesex County, not Union County.